How Hotels Can Use this Downtime to Innovate

Unfortunately, your hotel is probably not running at high occupancies right now (but it will come back!). In busier days you wished for quiet time to reflect, to strategize, and to do some systems housekeeping or research into the latest tools and technology to assist you in your role. Now you have that time, so use it to your advantage.

Now is a very good time to invest in the right technology to try to protect that future customer and make sure that they book through your own channels when business returns.

Invest in technology, time and training

The hotel companies that are going to invest in the right technology now are going to come through the recovery stronger. When you invest in and deploy technology, but your business is running at 100 miles an hour, you feel like you don't have time to breathe.

You really have to find the time to get to know the new technology, to deploy correctly, to fine tune it, and now you have this time. Use it wisely.

Whether you've been using your technology for a long time, you're very new to it, or you're deploying right now, you have this incredible luxury of actually playing around with your systems.

You can test it, check that the integrations work seamlessly, and make sure that all your numbers are 100% right. Data quality evaluation is something we take very seriously at Duetto, but sometimes there are other systems that need a little bit of a clean-up.

Scenario Planning

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut with reports. You create one and then run with that, when really you should be constantly iterating on it, adding in new metrics, asking new things of your data.

Now you have a lot of time to run reports and to do a bit of scenario planning. ‘What if this happened when that happened?’ Try it out and see what happens to the numbers. Add in new reports, such as booking and stay dates; build out your room type differentials or guest segments; or analyse what channels have proved most profitable. There’s lots you can be doing to boost your knowledge and prepare your future tactics.

If you’re using Duetto you now have a lot of time to familiarize yourself with all the different features of the applications. When we built GameChanger, and then ScoreBoard and BlockBuster, there was some criticism that we made these applications too complicated.

Yes, these applications are fairly complex, and that’s because a good revenue manager needs to have all these options at their disposal.

Now you can really familiarize yourself and understand what all the different features in the applications can do.

Right now, many of us are working from home, and there’s a lot of spring cleaning going on. Apply that thinking to your revenue strategy, discover new things, work on building new reports and planning for different scenarios.

We have a lot of time on our hands right now. And even when recovery comes, no one truly knows what the new normal will be like. But if you have used this time wisely, investing in your systems and in your knowledge of how they work, you will be better prepared for what the new world throws at you.